And the Land Lay Still

Product Information

With workshop events held just before, and roughly a year after, the referendum on Scottish independence, the urgency of these political questions was a strong presence in our discussions. It was in this light that Italian critic Carla Sassi offered an ‘outsider’s perspective’ suggesting we think twice before discounting the force of literary nationalism: Here is a situation: a country that is not fully a country, a nation that does not quite believe itself to be a nation, exists within, and as a small and distant part of, a greater state. The greater state was once a very great state, with its own empire. It is no longer great, but its leaders and many of its people like to believe it is. For the people of the less-than country, the not-quite nation, there are competing, conflicting loyalties. They are confused. ( Robertson 2010, 534) The quotation is from And the Land Lay Still, James Robertson’s panoramic novel of post-war Scotland, and probably the most ambitious historical fiction to emerge from Britain this century. Robertson’s task is to spread the paltry saga of Scottish devolution onto a vivid social canvas, stretching the narrow ‘common ground’ of constitutional debate to the full dimensions of the modern nation. The resulting tome attempts to weave every corner, faction and identity of the country into an intelligible Story of Scotland, one that makes political and emotional sense of quietly transformative times. This is a highly diffuse and murky tale, and Robertson’s task is made all the more difficult because he cannot count on his readership – even his Scottish readership – recognising the basic timeline and dramatis personae. The book employs several complex framing devices, but even the factual grist of the main narrative will seem obscure to readers unschooled in recent Scottish history. This makes a high degree of political exposition necessary, such that And the Land Lay Still often feels less like a novel ‘about’ history than one ‘doing’ history: producing as it goes the story it seems to be recounting. For the majority of the book Robertson is not dramatising or re-telling events already familiar to the reader, but introducing and explaining them for the first time. In this respect, the novel carries within itself the problem of national historical recovery it sets out to represent. It is a hugely informative and justly popular book, bringing the unloved and largely untold story of devolution to a much larger audience. But Robertson’s historical ambition has its novelistic trade-off, and the book’s on-the-fly explication requires that characters and happenings arrive oversaturated with representative significance. In one early scene, the central character could almost be speaking for a reader under-convinced by this approach, glancing at his surroundings and observing that he ‘had never come across such enthusiasm for political debate, especially when it revolved around questions of national identity and self-determination’ ( Robertson 2010, 64). The majority report, we believe, has the effect of magnifying the extent of the social and cultural differences between Scotland, Wales and England. This is partly because of the way it handles in the historical section the concept of ‘nationhood’ – with Scotland and Wales thus appearing as separate nations with distinctive values and ways of life ‘struggling to be free’. In contrast there is no matching study of the more homogenous contemporary pattern of social and cultural values and behaviour which characterise all the different parts of the United Kingdom. ( Royal Commission 1973, II, vii) Robertson, of course, cleverly has some of these stories crossing one another, with people bumping into each other and then not meeting again for many years, or meeting in ways you might not suspect. But, while their individual stories are certainly interesting and do show up the complicated nature of politics in Scotland, we are asked to sympathise with a variety of disparate characters and, inevitably, the most interesting ones tend to be the less than pleasant ones, namely the violent thug and the foot fetish Tory. Did Robertson intend this? I suspect not, though this may just be my perverse nature and other readers may come to love the characters Robertson wants us to love. Nevertheless, it is fascinating account of Scottish history in the second half of the twentieth century, even if not entirely successful. Publishing history

What Leigh discovers in the vent takes her to the Mojave Desert, to a job working with a NASA-like space agency that is using a newly-discovered form of fuel to send people to the furthest reaches of our solar system and beyond. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. The novel was enjoyed by everyone in the group - which is no mean feat as there are usually lots of different opinions around the room and few books gain a unanimous accolade!Scottish International promoted itself as a magazine for the development of a radical critique of culture and society, experiment being very much at the heart of it. Just as Bob Tait was giving up the magazine he wrote that ‘basically I’ve seen this magazine as a kind of exploration vehicle, getting as far as possible into the depths, some of them murky, of the society and culture within viewing range.’ [… ] In tracing these magazines and debates, we can discern a fierce reaction to insularity at the start of the 1960s, but as we move through to Scottish International there’s still a very sceptical vision of cultural nationalism and the pitfalls of being too entrenched within certain forms of national identity. There’s a passionate focus on Scotland but also a deep suspicion of complacent ways of thinking about identity. ( Recording, Workshop 1) The stories we follow are mainly of those that are not too well-off. Apart from Michael Pentreich, we follow the stories of a couple who have two sons who follow very different paths, one a gentle left-winger, another a violent thug, the friend of the man of the couple who, one day, walks out on his wife and daughter without explanation and whom we meet early on (without being aware of it). We follow the story of the posh Tory M.P. who spends much of his time fighting with his wife (often physically but she is an equal match for him) and squandering his money, and their three children, two of whom do well and make money and one of whom, the daughter, drops out. The journalist, daughter of a generally absent father, the woman who keeps a sort of literary/political salon and the reformed thug who may or may not have killed William McRae also feature. The most interesting, perhaps, is the tale of James Bond (it really is his name but he changes it to Peter Bond later on, for obvious reasons), who really is a spy. He is recruited at a low level and remains at a low level, working in London However, he is later sent to Scotland, where he spies on the Scottish nationalist movement, as the authorities are worried it might turn into another Ireland, though Bond does not believe that that is even vaguely likely. The sporadic violence is both amateur and ineffectual.

Like Michael in And the Land Lay Still, he was sent to school in Perthshire, in his case Glenalmond College, "a Scottish boarding school modelled on the English public school system", from which he emerged into the world of books (as did Massie, coincidentally; other old boys include Charles Falconer and Robbie Coltrane). The writing life was his ambition from the start. "Edinburgh University was about getting an education, it wasn't about preparing myself for any other career." After writing a PhD thesis on Sir Walter Scott, he worked as a sales rep for Cassell, then moved into bookselling with Waterstone's. The idea behind this was to give the appearance of doing something, which would avoid the need for real action for as long as the commission was deliberating. According to Wilson, the commission was designed to spend years taking minutes, but in public it gave the appearance that the government was taking the issue seriously. It was hoped that, by the time the commission reported, the SNP would have gone away. ( Finlay 2004, 322) 7 Comments ranged from how much readers enjoyed the fact that all the story strands wove together so satisfyingly at the end, to one lady who admitted that, being English, not only had she gained an interesting slant on recent history as an “outsider”, but she had also learned new Scots words she had never heard before. Books of 2010: Authors, actors, politicians, sports stars and more reveal their top reads of the year". Scotland on Sunday. 14 December 2010 . Retrieved 1 July 2011. Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still is the most fully realised attempt to make a cohesive national story of the period and forces of devolution. Having been politically active in the 1980s, notably through the pro-devolution magazine Radical Scotland (1983–91) – thinly disguised in the novel as Root & Branch – Robertson naturally began with events and debates he had experienced first-hand. But on beginning to revisit this period he encountered a historical problem:

Irvine Welsh enjoys a sweeping look through a Scottish lens at a turbulent era". The Guardian. UK. 24 July 2010 . Retrieved 1 July 2011. Writing in The Guardian, the writer Irvine Welsh said of the "highly ambitious" book that it “represents nothing less than a landmark for the novel in Scotland, and underlines the author's position as one of Britain's best contemporary novelists”. [7] Scotland First Minister Alex Salmond selected the novel as his book of the year for 2010, telling the Scotland on Sunday that it was “outstanding”, “important”, and the author’s finest work. [8] Full of gritty fictional characters, intertwined with real people and events from history, the novel explains better than any history book how Scotland became what she is today. Despite, after the decisive referendum of 1997, the oft-quoted appeal to the fact that the parliament was the ‘settled will of the Scottish people’, there had been, in fact, no Scottish political consensus on devolution. It happened, if not quite by chance, then through a series of apparently accidental and certainly unpredictable intersections of trains of events running in often contradictory directions. (ibid.) The full rigours of a politicized assertion of Scottishness would have to wait for the debates of 2012–14, however. In 1983, Joyce McMillan felt that the ‘Predicament of the Scottish Writer’ – updated from Edwin Muir’s 1936 diagnosis in Scott and Scotland – was marked by an over-developed reflex of self-assertion, noting that the Scottish cultural establishment ‘cherishes its hard-won consciousness of the ways in which Scottish culture has been discriminated against, and tends to demand that that consciousness never be let slip; and it is at this point that the artistic rot set in’ ( McMillan 1983, 69). Its ill-effects may be literary and aesthetic, but the remedy is clearly political:

The evening of discussion and debate will include playwright Peter Arnott, campaigner and activist Amal Azzudin, Lyceum Artistic Director David Greig, National Theatre of Scotland Dramaturg Rosie Kellagher, acclaimed journalist and writer Joyce McMillan, and author James Robertson, with music from award-winning folk artist Mairi Campbell and extracts of Peter Arnott’s stage adaptation in development, from a recent reading commissioned by National Theatre of Scotland. If for Craig the ‘effective cause’ of devolution’s endorsement in 1997 was cultural revolution, there is little doubt that the proximate cause was electoral. This part of the story is well-trodden ground, and vividly told in Robertson’s novel: Winnie Ewing’s sensational victory for the SNP in the 1967 Hamilton by-election, and growing alarm within the Labour government at the threat posed by the nationalists, rising sharply after the discovery of North Sea Oil in 1970. Both to allay and defer these pressures, Harold Wilson announced his intention to appoint a Royal Commission on the Constitution in late 1968. Home> Fiction from Scotland> And the Land Lay Still And the Land Lay Still By (author) James Robertson Craig’s foreword to the Determinations series he edited for Polygon: ‘the 1980s proved to be one of the most productive and creative decades in Scotland this century — as though the energy that had failed to be harnessed by the politicians flowed into other channels’. The first three books of the Determinations series were published in 1989, making the foreword evidence of the cultural phenomenon on which it claims to reflect. ( Thomson 2007) Winner of the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year 2010, And The Land Lay Still is a panoramic exploration of late 20th Century Scotland through the eyes of James Robertson’s characters; natives, immigrants, journalists and politicians, dropouts and spooks making their way in a changing country.In the sections in Chapters 4 and 5 on the Scottish and Welsh peoples, more emphasis should be laid on the fact that the differences described were historical and had been narrowing over time. Pat: This is a powerful story of Scotland and of the growth of Scottish Nationalism from the 1950s to the present day, evoking strong nostalgic memories of life during these times. In a sense, Robertson says, "this novel is a riposte to that. What I'm trying to say is: 'Immerse yourself. A lot has gone on. The place has changed beyond recognition. We haven't had civil war or bloodbaths, thank God, but we have had change.'" And the Land Lay Still is the fourth novel by Scottish novelist and poet James Robertson. Upon publication in 2010 it was widely praised for its breadth of exploration of Scottish society in the latter half of the 20th century.